A spokesman for Elizabeth Taylor once claimed that the actress’s considerable weight gain was due to “her glands”. When the satirist Peter Cook heard this explanation, he naturally expressed his utmost sympathy.
“Poor woman,” he said. “There she is, in her suite in the Dorchester, harmlessly watching television. Suddenly her glands pick up the phone and order two dozen éclairs and a bottle of brandy. ‘No,’ she screams, ‘please, I beg you!’ But her glands take no notice. Determined glands they are, her glands. You’ve never known glands like them. The trolley arrives and Elizabeth Taylor hides in the bathroom, but her glands take the éclairs, smash down the door and stuff them down her throat…”
What a pity Peter Cook is no longer with us. He’d have been fascinated to hear the latest breakthrough in our understanding of obesity. And we owe it to no less an authority than Oprah Winfrey. The queen of American media has informed listeners to her podcast that, if you’re obese and struggling to lose weight, it’s not because you lack willpower. You’re just a victim of bad luck. Because, she explains, “Obesity is a disease.”
Well, that’s a relief. Being fat is not our fault after all. It’s merely a disease we happen to have. Good to know. I’ve got just one question.
How exactly is this disease transmitted?
We know that lots of people are slim in their youth but become fat later on. Presumably, therefore, the disease is not genetic, but viral. One day, you’re sitting on the bus, minding your own business, when an obese passenger suddenly sneezes crumbs from his steak bake all over you. That night, you go to bed feeling queasy – and when you wake up next morning, you’re 18 stone.
I do hope scientists will conduct more research into this awful malady. For one thing, I’d love to know why the disease is so contagious in the US and other rich Western countries – yet in poor countries, the disease doesn’t seem to spread at all. Do Ethiopians have herd immunity? Or did they discover a miraculous vaccine?
In the West, we do now have weight-loss drugs – but sadly, their manufacturers just can’t keep up with demand. None the less, there are steps we can all take to stop the disease of obesity from spreading.
First, practise social distancing, by standing two metres away from the nearest fat person. And second, always wear a face mask.
That should stop you from catching the obesity virus. Or, at the very least, stop you shoving éclairs into your mouth.
Censorship won’t prevent the next Southport
Who’s really to blame for the Southport massacre? The Government and its supporters have some curious ideas. In part, they blame Amazon, for selling the killer a kitchen knife (a weapon that would of course have been impossible to procure otherwise). And they also blame social media.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, told MPs on Tuesday that “social media companies need to take responsibility” for the “dangerous material” shared on their platforms. And Dale Vince, the multimillionaire Labour donor, strongly agrees.
“I think [Axel Rudakubana] was radicalised to a considerable extent by content on social media,” he argued on the BBC’s Question Time. “One of the biggest things we can do to prevent this happening in the future is to control social media properly.”
But this is to get cause and effect the wrong way round. Rudakubana watched violent videos on social media because he’s an evil psychopath. Ms Cooper and Mr Vince, however, seem to think that watching violent videos on social media caused him to become an evil psychopath.
In reality, clamping down on social media will do nothing to stop the next Southport. Still, I suppose we can understand why people on the Left might take this peculiar line. Far preferable to rail against social media than to contemplate other, rather more awkward topics. Such as, for example, the failure of multiculturalism, and the possibility that the politicians who foisted it on us made our country catastrophically less safe.
The Traitors is driving myself mad
Did yourself watch the latest series of The Traitors? If so, yourself will doubtless have been grinding yourselves’ teeth. Because, as in previous series, the contestants had a maddening habit of saying “yourself” instead of “you”. At the end of each episode, when they were required to reveal which contestant they thought was a “traitor”, they would almost all say: “I voted for yourself.”
It’s baffling. Do these people only speak like this on the show, or do they do it in everyday life, too? Do they sing, “Happy birthday to yourself”? Do they say, “Will yourself marry myself”? Do they think that Queen had a hit with Ourselves Will Rock Yourselves?
Experts in linguistics claim that there’s actually a subtle psychological purpose to such phrasing. Saying “yourself” rather than “you”, these experts argue, makes the contestants’ remarks seem less personal, and therefore less likely to anger the person they’re voting off the show.
I think that’s nonsense. If anything, it’s likely to anger that person all the more. Because he or she will be thinking: “It’s bad enough to be voted off. But it’s even worse to be voted off by an illiterate moron.”
Way of the World is a twice-weekly satirical look at the headlines aiming to mock the absurdities of the modern world. It is published at 7am every Tuesday and Saturday
